Smokelong Quarterly

  • Pull Up a Chair: A Conversation with Tyrese Coleman

    Pull Up a Chair: A Conversation with Tyrese Coleman

    Tyrese Coleman discusses her debut memoir, HOW TO SIT.

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    This week, a story at Smokelong Quarterly instructs us on how to become a new person. The title of Rebecca Bernard’s story, “How to Be Another Person in Five Days,” plays humorously with the trope of familiar self-help programs and…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    If you recall your Greek mythology, you’ll remember Cassandra, princess of Troy, priestess of Apollo, seer of prophecies, and patron saint of women everywhere screaming themselves blue but never being heard. Cassandra’s prophecies unfailingly proved to be true, but still…

  • The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tara Laskowski

    The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tara Laskowski

    I realized that I’m interested in how people change when something terrible happens to someone else.

  • Starting in the Middle

    In an interview with Flash Frontier, Tara Laskowski, senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, talks about her new short story collection Bystanders, the line between fiction and reality, the present tense, and the appeal of flash fiction: I don’t often like to wrap…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    There are countless metaphors for love: a rose, a flame, a garden, a loaded gun, a battlefield. We’ve heard them all—or so we thought. This week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Joyland editor Lisa Locascio recommended Amelia Gray’s story, “The…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    The novella-in-flash: What does it mean? How is it even possible? Kathleen Rooney and Abby Beckel, editors at Rose Metal Press, which specializes in hybrid forms, have recently set about defining this lesser-known form. This week, they spoke about My…

  • This Week in Short Fiction

    The Los Angeles Review of Books enlisted Kayla Williams, a veteran sergeant and Arabic linguist, to compile a list of war narratives by women for Memorial Day. Williams, herself an accomplished writer of two memoirs on her war experience and…

  • Here Are Some Stories Seth Likes

    Here are some excerpts from and links to some very short writing that made my day better and hopefully makes your day better too. “Doesn’t it make you feel like an old-timey big-city career girl, carrying parcels up your stoop,…

  • Here’s Some Stories I Like

    As always, here’s some very short stories that’ll only take you a few moments to read but that made me feel something and hopefully will do the same for you. “The messages most people send are very simple.” — At…